What happens when you become the client?

It’s an interesting question, one that we’ve come to grips with over the past year while we worked on creating our new website. In many ways it will help us to work better with our clients, being able to understand certain feelings and decisions that are made during the course of a project.

Even the best laid plans are susceptible to change; a change of mind, a feeling that things are not quite perfect, or changes in the detail or direction that can derail a project. Part of our job is to minimise this risk, to allow the correct client stakeholders into our process, to help allow them to own the project, and see it develop and come to fruition.

This is why we always work on our process; a successful strategy starts with making sure everybody shares the same vision for a project. There was no exception in this case and we kicked off the project by holding a vision statement workshop. In this structured workshop we shared our thoughts, opinions and ideas of what we thought our business and the website was to encapsulate. The project was quite personal to the whole team and it was a pretty full on session. Once we finally agreed on a shared vision, we recorded our ideas into a requirements document. The requirements helped form our initial site content structure and wireframes which the team was really happy with.

Now that we had a solid framework in place, we started to ideate. We needed a strong concept to underpin the site content and the look and feel. The team had some beautiful and out-there ideas, but once we looked into the execution of these they would have taken many months to produce. But like all clients we needed to pitch something achievable to budget and timeline and decided to go straight to the core of the idea; the work. We believe strongly that at Pugh Morgan it always comes back to the meaningful work we craft and that we needed to clearly communicate this. The work became the hero of the site.

During the development phase, it is important to always be open to learning. UX dictates how a part of a website will function, and with a bespoke website design it will be more than likely that something new will raise its head. When a problem is solved, that knowledge is retained for the next time it pops up.
People change their mind, and because of this, version control and regular backups are essential. It can help us to roll back to a previous state if development has gone off on an undesirable tangent.

Our goals changed many times during the project. Partly because being involved in it for a long period of time makes you question the project. In the end, we really think we’ve created a site that embodies our brand and showcases our skills. We worked as a team to complete it and we hope you enjoy it.